What is RASPMOOD Design

LINUX KERNEL

A board’s general functionality depends on the kernel

as does its ability to be the solution to your problems, or the reason for them (needless to say, the fundamental system issues such as power usage or the idle time and wake up among various tasks, all depend on the kernel)

What do the majority of SBC suppliers do?

In a rush to follow the latest fashion of the Linux kernel (often a marketing rather than a technical strategy), not having the engineering structures in place, but having production capabilities and saving on precious time and money (lots of it) during a launch phase, they rush to get the kernel out on to the market WITHOUT accurately testing all the board peripherals or the thousand facets of the kernel.

They probably aren’t even able to do so, seeing as they only produce boards but don’t design them…two very different things. They often say quite clearly that the operating system is “community” driven and therefore fix it yourself if it breaks.

Try putting a call for help in one of the 1000 web forums that deal with these issues and see what happen.

Software

Who knows you might get lucky.

What do we do at Novasom Industries?

Our “latest” kernel available on line has been tested and checked at the lowest level with all of the board’s peripherals and corrected where necessary. When we are satisfied with its stability, we release a new version, guaranteeing our customers protection from age old recursions and bugs. And the old versions are always available as factory settings. Upon bootstrapping a Novasom it says: kernel xx-yy-zz + Novasom which means that this kernel is ours and not the network’s.

This doesn’t just guarantee its functionality, but also its stability over time, its retro compatibility and against the recursion of bugs. Just to give you an idea which we will take into further detail later, the kernel being used in August 2016 has undergone over a 1000 improvements both big and small. And what you find on line proposed by other SBC manufacturers? Is that up to par?

We could discuss a thousand aspects of SW and HW on this board, about how it is industrial and what it means to have rugged solutions instead of false commercial ones … but … call our Novasom sales rep and ask for help, you’ll get serious and real time answers.

But let’s get back to us, a Linux kernel, any version, is a set of SW features taken from “on line” and being an open source software with no formal owner, has no guarantees. It is constantly being updated by who knows who with no guarantee of function continuity, problem solving or retroactive compatibility. In other words, old and new problems come back to haunt you.

Practically what happens while you are working with a certain kernel, you do a “necessary” upgrade to resolve bugs, activate previously unsupported peripherals and other stuff, and all of a sudden the game has changed, and you find yourself forced to redo part of the sw already developed because the functions you were using just aren’t there any more or have changed.

This is the situation, the plain truth. And you can see how the development of any application SW becomes complex and uncertain. Ask any developer …

Again: the Novasom Industries kernel is fully tested and guaranteed to work with whatever Novasom hardware you use.